In honor of the birthday of Chicago author Valerie Taylor, we will be celebrating September as Lesbian Pulp Fiction Month. The month will include an exhibit of Lesbian pulp fiction and a paper presentation

Valerie Taylor was a prolific Chicago area lesbian pulp novelist, poet, and activist. She published pulps largely during the 1950s and 1960s and was heavily involved in gay activism in Chicago. She was also in a relationship with Pearl Hart, one of the people Gerber/Hart is named for. Taylor passed away in the 1990s, but her novels are still considered pulp fiction classics.

Jen Dentel of Gerber/Hart will be presenting the paper “Midwestern Farmers’ Daughters: Heartland Values and Cloaked Resistance in the Novels of Valerie Taylor.” The paper focuses on Chicagoan Valerie Taylor’s early lesbian pulp novels (1950s/1960s) and argues that Taylor subverted the typical lesbian pulp narrative by inserting references to queer books, spaces and terms within her novel. The paper also examines how she portrays an accurate picture of gay life in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, including the growing gay activist movement. Following the presentation of the paper will be time for questions and comments. Seating will open at 6:10. The paper will be presented at the Publishing Queer/Queer Publishing Conference at University of London in October.